Edit: This post has been edited on June 7, 2025 to include more information about pans vs tubes and photos of student-grade Cotman substitutions.
I’m a member of Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy, and I’m joining her Beginner/Foundations class starting June 12. Although a person who’s painted for four years and maintained a three-update-a-week watercolor blog for three of those years can probably not exactly be called a beginner, I still feel like a beginner in many ways – good and bad! When you’re chaotically self-taught, it’s always good to circle back to fundamentals, and my recent feelings of slump have had me yearning for structure and simplicity. I always learn a lot from Claire’s tips on water control, plein air shortcuts, and specific landscape elements, such as alpenglow.
The one aspect of painting where I don’t feel like a beginner is color mixing and pigment knowledge. Learning about pigments and paint options almost feels like a separate hobby, one where I’ve really dug in. I’d like to put that knowledge to work for my fellow students.
Read more